Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. I’m a sporting fan. I know many of those who listen to the podcast are also sporting fans. And right now, we are in the early stages of the AFL season. The season starts, it’s full of hype and hope and every team’s had the best possible preseason you could ever imagine. And then round 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 come. And for many teams, the hope of a premiership, the hope of being a top place team, the hope of making finals and even the hope of competing starts to suddenly fade when your team has that terrible start. I’m a long-suffering Carlton supporter. For those who are based in Australia, the Australian Football League. We are absolutely a team that has promised so much over a long period of time and delivered not enough. And I would say this season is without doubt one where we are definitely in the midst of that. And what that got me thinking as we’re planning for today’s session was just how often things don’t go to plan. You feel like you might have the right people, the right game plan, you’ve done the right training, right, the right offer when it comes to businesses and you’re just not able to get it to work. That can be really difficult because we feel that we’ve done all of the work required and we’ve got the right strategies, but we’re just not delivering on those growth targets or we’re not making the profit levels that we need to, or we don’t have customers that are as happy with our sales in particular process as we would like them to have been.
And look for me, that is something that many, many businesses cross paths with more than once during the revolution. And I’ve just worked with a customer who had in the first three months of the year and that by the end of March they simply weren’t hit their sales numbers, they were miles behind what they had to do. And this was last year. Right. So, we’ve had a full year now to be able to look at that. And this customer had to really look hard around what their offer was, how they were going about their process and essentially how they were engaging their customers. Because for 10 years it had worked and that had growth year on year, on year for that 10-year period. And all of a sudden it wasn’t working. And I call this not recognizing to change before you have to. And this customer had seen their market evolve, but they hadn’t evolved with it. And then all of a sudden, all those cracks that they’d been able to paper over, they all joined together and became one great big chasm and they were not able to overcome the issues that they were having in the market. So, for them, three months in, they were really struggling. Now we sat down and went through a whole change management piece around their sales program and we did a whole number of things. Good news is they were able to change it. They still ended up having a record year to despite those terrible first three months. Right. We really did achieve something pretty special over that period.
However, for me, what it reminded me of is the importance of making sure that we really are on top of our game when it comes to performing with our teams. Simply doing what we’ve always done isn’t going to get the results forever. And certainly, in my experience I’ve seen teams not change, not change, not change and have significant performance achievements but, but then fall off a cliff. And it’s because they weren’t making the micro changes needed across their journey, which eventually added up to a macro change and their business fell through the floor. Right now, many people listening. I know you will have been involved in this across your career where things were going well and they suddenly weren’t, or where things just couldn’t grow to the level that you wanted your business to.
So today I’d like to talk about three things that we can look at when it comes to changing the results of our team. Right. What do we do when things are not going well? Where do we start? And how can we have some confidence that where we’re going to invest our time and deep dive into performance will deliver us some results for our business. Now I’m going to work these around the high-performance framework that I’ve spoken about previously, which is strategy, talent and energy. A framework that’s been out in the market for a long period of time, but I’ve tailored to make it most relevant for what I see and out in the market. So, we’ll go through each of these, and certainly there’s three categories, but I’ll pick out some areas that I’d really encourage you to look at if your team’s not performing. And I have no doubt that you have started to look at some of these. But my hope is that there’s one or two or three in there that you haven’t looked at, and they could make all the difference for you when it comes to turning that mediocre or that poor performance of your team around.
Okay, so let’s look at strategy as our first part. So, for me here, there’s some really impactful pieces around where we start here. And the first one is, do we have the right goals for our business? Is our sales team all working towards the same thing? Because if we’re not, what I see invariably happen is that sales leaders are run ragged. They’re moving left, they’re moving right, they’re up, they’re down, and they simply can’t keep up. So, they miss some of those really important pieces of feedback or market dynamics that they need to be on top of.
So, for me, this comes down to sitting down, doing your strategic planning, bringing your team in together, having that day, and saying, right, what is it that we want to actually achieve this year? And making sure we are all on the same page. Because until we get that right, we can’t be confident that everyone is out there selling the same things in the same way the majority of the time, in a more compact way, that the majority of people are doing the majority of the same thing the majority of the same time. Right. Because if that doesn’t happen, then we don’t have consistency across our business. And it’s very, very hard for us to learn and evolve because all that information coming in has different drivers. So, getting your goals right is the first piece I’d really suggest three there.
The second one is making sure actually going after the right customers. People talk about your ICP, your ideal customer profile. Yes, it is critically important. The piece here I’m talking about, though, is making sure that the leads and the prospects we’re chasing are related to that ICP, are related to the type of customers that we know we can win. And by the way, if we don’t know the type of customers that we win, if we don’t know who the customers are that really do tend to buy from us, more than others, then we need to do that exercise first and get really clear on who we should be targeting. But once we’ve got that making sure we are targeting them and we’re being disciplined, if we’re looking to target commercial businesses in a certain geography with a certain size turnover, or then we need to be making sure that our leads are those type of businesses. There’s no point if we go in a geography that we don’t service well or we don’t have the history of servicing because we’re less likely to win. Right? We don’t have the social proof points or the case studies or the customer testimonials to talk about that. If we’re selling to different sized businesses who have different needs, then they’re not necessarily gonna place the value behind our service. Right? Particularly if they’re smaller than our standard customer. We’ve gotta get really, really clear on making sure we are targeting the right customers so that our teams have the best chances of winning. Because if we’re not, and if we’re allowing any type of leader or prospect to come into our business, then our close rates will naturally fall and our sales team will be busy working on the wrong things. So not only is your strategy about getting your goals right, but it’s also about making sure that we’re targeting the right customers.
And the third piece here is around making sure our offer is right. And this for me is one of the huge benefits around having the whole team doing the same thing. Because we start to get that feedback coming in en masse from the field. And when we’re getting that feedback being driven in really rapidly into our business, we start to recognize where things are not going well, we start to recognize the areas we’re doing well, we start to recognize the areas for opportunity. And then all of a sudden, we have data in which we can do something about. I’m a huge advocate of team training. And for those who work with me, one of the reasons of training that I really like, that’s a little bit of an unintended benefit, is all the feedback that we get from the field when we’re doing that training. Because that feedback that allows you to change your offer, update your offer, pivot on certain areas, and make those 1% changes that often result in you getting the business that you need.
So, when it comes to looking where things are not going all that well, I recommend we start with strategy, right? Where our goals are right, making sure we’re all aligned and doing the same thing, ensuring that we have the right Customers in our target zones. So, we’re being disciplined. Not only do we actually know who they are, but we’re being disciplined in targeting them. And then the third piece here is making sure that our offer’s right. And certainly, that becomes easier when we’re all doing the same thing. We all have some set goals and we’re out in front of our right customers, but we need to make sure that we’re really spending the time to just sense check that the offer we have in the market is. Right. Right. Has something changed in pricing? And the pricing market shifted is a classic example to add a little bit extra here. And for me, this is particularly important in markets where your cost base is somewhat variable. Right. And for me, it’s a terrific opportunity to look at your cost base when you recognize that your offer’s potentially a little bit off the mark. Right. Something’s changed in the industry that you may not have known about. So you can really quickly get onto that when you’re getting that rapid feedback back anyway, a little bit of an extra there around when it comes to strategy. So, strategy, we’re getting our goals right. We’re making sure we’re going after the right customers and that our offer is in the right place, right time, and we’re putting the right products out there. All right, so they’re the first three from strategy. No doubt that if your sales numbers are struggling, you’ve tried at least one of those. But I certainly recommend you look at all three of them.
Alright. The second one is the talent part of our strategy. And this isn’t just the talent of our people, but this is the broader talent of our go to market piece. And for me, the main one here is to make sure that we’re looking at how we’re communicating our offer. So that is, are we communicating the right amount of value to our customers or the outcomes so things that they couldn’t necessarily do for themselves. Are we communicating those to our customers in the most effective manners.
Now, last week’s episode so just aired, and that was episode 109, that was all about our sales literature out in the market. So, it’s a great place to start if you’re out there and struggling as a team is to make sure that we’re communicating the right offer and the right value out to our customers.
So certainly, when it comes to a talent point of view, I would be starting at making sure that we are communicating the value and the outcomes that we provide really clearly. Because if we’re not, then it doesn’t Matter how good our product or service is, if customers aren’t recognizing that value, then we’re unlikely to win business. Right? So, getting the team together, this becomes value from a written point of view, be it sales proposals, sales materials, be it emails, be it our social media work, any other content that we’ve got out there, but also how we’re communicating as salespeople, right? That we’re getting the right amount of value to our customers.
The next piece there is very similar when it comes to value. It’s recognizing the value that our customers want. So, so many times I’ve seen great sales teams start to struggle because they’re not listening to their customers. They’ve become really confident that their offer is amazing and they don’t need to listen to customers. Ie, it’s a cookie cutter, one size fits all. Or perhaps they’ve become a little bit nervous and they spend so much time thinking about what to say next that they miss some of those really important cues from our customers. And I’ll certainly say an edgy sales team is one we don’t want to have. I would far prefer to have a confidence sales team look and perhaps a little bit too confident. I’d have that every day over an edgy team, right? Because for me, a confident team, we can slow them down, we can get them to listen, we can get them to look at different ways of doing things right? Whereas an edgy team can be so nervous about what they’re doing in front of customers, it can really come out in their pitch. But more importantly is for me, edgy salespeople and edgy sales teams tend to go to a default, right? They worry about losing deals, so they stay to a very, very rigid process and structure.
Now, I am all for a sales process, but I also like to make sure that teams have the ability to stop, slow down, and recognize exactly what their customers need before charging ahead. Because when we get that right, we can build those relationships with customers. That can take a lot of time out of the sales deal cycle. And the shorter our deal cycles are, the more deals we can get to, the more we close and the more revenue the business makes.
So, for me, when we’re having a look at the talent aspect around our performance of our sales teams, I’d really encourage you as leaders or even individual salespeople to look at how you’re communicating the value and outcomes that you provide for your customers, but also that we’re listening and understanding exactly what our customers need, because it’s critical that we get both of Them. Right. To have our customers want to engage with us and then move through their process or our process together.
Okay. So, we’ve gone through a strategic piece, a talent piece, and the third one’s all around energy. So, this essentially comes down to work ethic. Are we getting out to see the right number of customers at the right times and doing everything we could from not only a work ethic point of view, but a team point of view? Right. As a group, we’re working together and really maximising our time in the market. And for me, the easiest way to do this is to look at your three metrics, your sales numbers, your pipeline size, and the number of meetings or quotes that you’re getting out. All three recognize different stages of the sales process. But if you’re not measuring each of those three, then we can really be open to blind spots in how we’re running in the market. And what I mean by that is, if we’re not measuring sales results versus pipeline size, we don’t know close rates. If we’re not measuring pipeline size versus quotes, we’re not sure how effective we are at not only getting out to customers, but getting quotes out to the right customers. And if we’re not measuring simply meeting numbers or quote numbers that we’re getting out there on their own, then we’re actually not recognizing whether or not our team are working hard enough. It is certainly pretty common that I see teams not delivering their numbers because they’re not working hard enough. But more importantly than that, and perhaps more regularly than that, is that I see teams working hard enough, but working in the wrong areas.
So, this is where the strategy and the talent piece are important, but also the energy piece to make sure that our teams are actually out there generating the right number of prospects in the right time. Right. We’re not just loading in into our pipeline and then leaving our customers alone. Right. As prospects and not bringing them forward. We. We’re not loading in a whole lot of quotes and then not engaging with our customers after the quote. That is following up and working through potential roadblocks or issues and getting decisions made. Right. Or we’re simply not effective enough as a team at moving customers from. Yeah, I’m interested and I’ve got some pricing and some quotations and an idea about what you’re gonna do to. Yeah, it’s time to go. It’s time to move forward.
So, for me, the effort piece is one that we can really look at through metrics, but we can also look at it through the energy of the team, teams that are not working hard enough. There are some really common tell-tale signs around every meeting being done in a cafe, around phone calls being really slow to be returned, around CRM systems not being updated, around emails being really short and sharp and brief. Right. Rather than actually getting to, when required, to the heart of what’s needed. So, the effort piece can be really easily seen. And of course, it’s often multiple of those. Right. I know plenty of really strong performing salespeople who aren’t effective in their CRM management, but normally when the numbers aren’t there, we’ll see some energy issues across multiple stimulus there. But for me, if we can’t get the energy of our team up and running, no matter how good our offer is, then we’re really going to struggle to make inroads with our customers because it is absolutely infectious when it comes to bringing customers along the journey.
Okay, so there’s three things today around how we can try and supercharge our sales teams when we’re not actually hitting the results that we desire. Right. Or when things have mainly sales have perhaps fallen off a cliff or, or even more commonly started to really descend. Right. You know, at the top of that hill. And we’re starting to see our numbers drop off more than we’d like to. So, to recap, there, there are three areas. Strategy. This is all around setting goals, right? Making sure that we’re approaching the right customers and we got our offer right for them, so we know exactly what we should be putting in front of our customers. The second piece there is around talent so that we’re communicating that offer. Right? We’ve made sure it’s the right offer, but we’re communicating the value and outcomes of that. And we’re also understanding by listening exactly what our customers are looking for. Right. So often I see those edgy sales teams who are not performing miss these steps and then the last piece comes down to energy. Are we working hard enough on the right customers at the right time? That tends to blend into the strategy and talent piece. Right? But we look at our metrics, our sales numbers, our pipeline size and the number of quotes we’re getting out there.
If we start across those three, that for me, should give you a really good baseline around understanding where your gaps exist. Once you find those gaps, how you improve them can of course be the most difficult piece, but that’s something you can get in touch with if you need to, or work with those around you, your colleagues and those who have trodden that path before to help you fix. But for me, what I want to make sure is that you’re really clear on actually identifying where the issues are for your team and then you can go about fixing them.
So hopefully there’s some impactful pieces in there. I’d expect there’s at least 1, 2, 3, if not more, around areas you can find and probe to help you improve.
But before we go today, on week two of that Cairns Ironman Prep, it’s funny, right? You put it out on podcast, so it’s real now. And those, those around me, those who live up here, there’s a…there’s a crew going up to do the Ironman. I’ve always looked at them and wondered how they get so much of a training load in. And I’m up to two hours a day now, so that’s 14 hours a week. And I tell you what, it is calendar chaos. And for me, what I’ve had to do is start to sacrifice some of the things that I like. Like that half an hour to an hour in front of the tv three or four nights a week to zone out. That’s not happening now, right? It’s to bed and up early. And certainly, the first couple of weeks for me is seeing calendar chaos, just trying to fit that training in as I grow. That baseload is certainly getting challenging. And I’m even doing things like riding on the way when we go to a kid’s birthday party rather than sitting in the car, right, just to be able to get that time in. But for me at the moment, the challenge is calendar chaos. I’m enjoying it, I’m certainly tired. It’s a first step up in volume from an hour a day. I used to be an hour a day, kind of an hour to an hour and a quarter seven days a week. And here we are at two hours, if not more, but. And no doubt it’s gonna grow even more, but we’re on the journey on the way there. And for those who are listening, I hope that certainly listening to this gives you something or gives you some encouragement to go and find a personal health and fitness goal, right, to chase. If you haven’t got one already, please have a think about one. Whatever your Ironman equivalent is, and you know, by all means share it with me because I’d love to hear how you’re going about it and, and offer any perspective.
But in the meantime, please keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. We will see you again next week. Bye for now.
E110 Where to Start Looking When Sales Numbers Don’t Hit Targets
